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The former Philippines president Gloria Arroyo has pleaded not guilty to charges of rigging elections in 2007.

BBC news reports that Arroyo, who ruled the Philippines from 2001 to 2010, arrived at the courtroom in Manila under tight security and stayed just ten minutes.

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Car bombings, roadside bombs targeting police patrols and shootings leave at least 42 dead in Iraqi capital and beyond.

Taliban calls for Afghans to target foreign forces as protests over reported Quran burning continue to spread.

Caste politics -- which has dominated Indian elections for the better part of 30 years -- may just be on the way out, according to University of California professors Vasundhara Sirnate and Pradeep Chhibber. 

In an intriguing editorial for the Indian Express, the academics argue that class distinctions are beginning to trump caste distinctions in Uttar Pradesh -- India's largest state and in some ways the cradle of caste-based campaigning. It's worth a read. But I'm not buying it.  Here's why:

Right off the bat, Sirnate and Chhibber write, "In 2011, a survey in Uttar Pradesh asked voters whether they preferred leaders who could govern to those with whom they had a jati/biradari (caste) relationship. Seventy per cent of the respondents preferred a politician who could deliver public goods and “govern”, and only 20 per cent said that they would like someone from their jati/biradari as a political leader. There were no statistically significant differences in the responses between Hindus, Muslims, Dalits, upper castes, and other backward classes (OBCs)." Their conclusion: "The findings suggest that voters are tired of identity politics and may prefer to vote for politicians that perform."

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Car bombs strike across the city less than a week after a deadly attack at the capital’s police academy killed 19

Famous investor and author Jim Rogers has issued a resounding endorsement for investors seeking riches in Burma, the troubled nation on the rise officially titled Myanmar.

"If I could put all of my money into Myanmar, I would,” said Rogers, according to this Bloomberg report.

His rationale?

“It’s right between China and India, 60 million people, massive natural resources, agriculture ... they have metals, they have energy, they have everything.”

Burma also has more than 10 armed ethnic groups laying claim to much of the terrain that sustains that all that agriculture and contains all those natural resources. And not all of them are keen on government-blessed foreign mega-projects.

Rogers, a former Fox News regular, is well known for his book "A Bull in China: Investing Profitably in the World's Greatest Market."

Is a "A Bull in Myanmar" soon to follow?

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Victim says she felt "violated to the core''

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Here's a blast from the past on Uttar Pradesh politics, in honor of the ongoing election. My fellow disestablishmentarian Eric Randolph got me thinking about Raja Bhaiya with his piece on a warm, fuzzy NGO guy with the same monicker. And I ran across the so-called "don of Pratapgarh" in the Indian press awhile back -- where I was not surprised to learn that he's running for a seat in the legislative assembly of India's largest and most unruly state once again.

And anyway, who says yesterday's newspapers (and magazines) are only good for lining birdcages?

The Untouchables (Or why the more things change, the more they stay the same) Last October, police in India's most-populous state arrested legislator Raghuraj Pratap Singh. Was it justice at last, or just politics Uttar Pradesh-style?

By Jason Overdorf (This article appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in March 2003).

"HE SHOULD BE HANGED," says Vanita Mishra. She's talking about the man she believes murdered her husband. Eighteen months ago, the 24-year-old widow first approached the police in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and told them she knew a witness who had seen the man she suspected brutally beating her husband on the day he disappeared. Not only that, the alleged killer had 30 previous criminal charges against him.

The only problem was that the man she suspected was not only an alleged gangster, but also a state legislator: Raghuraj Pratap Singh, better known as "Raja Bhaiya," or Big Brother Raja. The police refused to register a case against him, Mishra believes, because they were too frightened.

For years, the handsome young legislator and his father, Udai Pratap Singh, ruled their rural district of Kunda with absolute authority. Members of the high Rajput caste, they behaved as though they still owned the land and as if the people were still their feudal subjects. Raja Bhaiya made no apologies for his ancestry, once explaining his supposed popularity by saying simply: "I am their raja." And when he drew fire from the press for holding a weekly meeting to settle the disputes of villagers, he said the people came to him because they couldn't afford to go to court.

But in October, Raja Bhaiya's freedom to rule over Kunda came to a sudden end. He was arrested on a relatively minor charge--allegedly threatening a one-time political crony--and then, some months later, amid a spiralling list of fresh police accusations, charged under India's toughest law, the controversial Prevention of Terrorism Act. So why, after failing for years to arrest Raja Bhaiya, did the police suddenly move?

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The children's book "Where Did I Come From?" -- an old educational tome filled with cartoon penises and vaginas -- is too hot for Malaysia.

Banned as obscene, the book is now deemed so dangerous that, according to the Asia One news outlet, "anyone convicted of circulating and distributing the book" can be hit with a $6,600 fine and three years in prison.

"To talk about the sensational feeling of making love and the rubbing of genitals - how's that (suitable) for children?" said Malaysia's home minister, according to Asia One.

The Malaysian site LoyarBurok has braved the ban by posting these graphic images from "Where Did I Come From?", which was written in the 1970s by a British man named Peter Mayle.

If the Malaysian government wants steer curious kids away from pursuing "sensational feelings," it might consider leaving this page from the book in circulation.

It's a depiction of two overweight parents doing it under an old quilt.

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Only opened to tourists in 2007, Arunachal Pradesh, in northeast India, is one of the country's most fascinating places -- with dozens of intriguing cultures, rampaging rivers that promise some of the world's best whitewater rafting, and the largest Tibetan monastery outside of Llasa.

Now, with the central government pushing development to stave off China's claims on the territory (see here about the border dispute), the under-visited state is looking to leverage a new road connecting it with neighboring Bhutan to boost tourism.  Personally, I can't wait.

At a meeting with a five-member Poverty Reduction Committee of Bhutan'ss National Assembly this week, Arunachal Chief Minister Nabam Tuki said that construction of a road from Tawang (home to the monastery I mentioned) to Bhutan was progressing at a rapid pace, according to CNN/IBN.

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Mayor Kawamura Takashi’s denial of the infamous 1937 massacre has triggered the suspension of sister-city relations between Nagoya and Nanjing and a furious backlash among the Chinese public and media. The mayor remains insistent, however, while Tokyo is attempting to play the affair down as a city-to-city matter. From The New York Times:

The falling out began Monday, when Nagoya’s mayor, Takashi Kawamura, told a visiting delegation of Chinese Communist Party officials from Nanjing that he doubted that Japanese troops had massacred Chinese civilians. Most historians say that at a minimum, tens of thousands of civilians were slaughtered in Nanjing in one of the most infamous atrocities of Japan’s military expansion across Asia in the early 20th century.

The falling out underscored how differing views of history remain a problem in Japan’s ties with the nations that it once conquered. While such denials are common by Japanese conservatives like Mr. Kawamura, they are rarely raised in such a public manner, or directly to Chinese officials. But there is also a widely shared perception in Japan that China’s government plays up the massacre for its own propaganda purposes ….

On Wednesday, Mr. Kawamura remained unrepentant, saying that he did not intend to retract the statement or apologize. He explained that his father had been a solider in Nanjing in 1945, and was treated kindly by city residents, which he said would have been impossible had an atrocity taken place there just eight years earlier.

Kawamura’s comments caused a fierce and immediate reaction in China. From The Wall Street Journal:

“Nanjing should invite Kawamura Takashi to tour the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall,” one user wrote on popular Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo, where Mr. Kawamura was among the most-discussed topics on Wednesday.

Others, however, directed their ire at Liu Zhiwei, the head of the Nanjing delegation, after Kyodo reported that Mr. Liu shook hands with Mr. Kawamura and didn’t directly challenge his denial of an event often described as Asia’s equivalent to the Holocaust.

“All the ghosts of the Nanjing Massacre are going to come knocking on Liu Zhiwei’s door,” wrote one Weibo user.

A Global Times editorial also focused on the Nanjing delegates’ allegedly ineffectual response. Editor-in-chief Hu Xijin shared it on Twitter:

The provocative remarks of the #Nagoya mayor should be strongly refuted, otherwise, more offensive remarks may follow. globaltimes.cn/NEWS/tabid/99/…

— Hu Xijin | 胡锡进 (@HuXijinGT) February 22, 2012

The article elaborated, arguing that Chinese officials should discard their “traditional passivity” when their foreign counterparts “press China’s buttons in the wrong way”:

Chinese officials should also believe that in the diplomatic world, there is no fuss that is too big to be caused. It is not a strategy, but a courageous style when China is squeezed on many diplomatic fronts. A relationship with a particular country getting a little better or worse would not impede China’s development. This attitude can prevent major events from erupting from small matters.

Diplomacy means honestly showing what we truly care about. It does not interfere with diplomatic skill.

While attending to those of others, we should also attend to our own feelings. It is a pity that almost all frictions in China’s diplomatic exchanges were first broken by foreign sides. Chinese officials should learn how to use the media to tilt public opinion against the provoker.

Following Kawamura’s insistence on Wednesday that “I don’t have any intentions of retracting my comments or apologizing“, however, Global Times trained its guns on the mayor himself:

We advise China to levy sanctions on Kawamura, for example listing him as an unwelcome person and barring his entry into China. Nagoya can be delisted from the schedule of Chinese tourism groups to Japan. China can also consider reducing economic exchanges with the city.

These are fully reasonable steps. Kawamura directly offended the delegation from Nanjing, the city victimized by the brutal killings in 1937. It is a serious mistake both from a diplomatic and historical perspective. As a result, he has infuriated the whole of Chinese society. Due punishment will appease the Chinese public, which has long thought of the Chinese diplomatic approach as weak ….

Punishing Kawamura is right. We understand the questions raised by a few Japanese rightists on Nanjing Massacre under certain circumstances. But Kawamura, as a politician, has crossed the line. A similar mistake would cost dearly for politicians everywhere. Imagine if a Chinese official applauded the atom bombs dropped on Japan in front of a delegation from Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Could the Japanese accept it?

See also CDT posts on Zhang Yimou’s recent ‘Flowers of War’, set in 1937 Nanjing, and on a 2010 joint Sino-Japanese report which marked a degree of convergence between official historical accounts of the massacre.

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© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: diplomacy, Global Times, history, Japan relations, Nanjing, Nanjing Massacre, nationalism, rape of nanking Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

India's mostly fictitious forests took another hit, as the environment ministry cleared mining and power companies to exploit 25 percent of forest land it had previously designated a "no-go area," at the prompting of the prime minister.

Don't get me wrong: I like electricity as much as the next guy. And I understand that India needs coal and power to fuel its economic growth -- and all the benefits that come along with it.  But given the grim reality of the typical environmental impact assessment exposed by Business Today's Anusha Subramanian last year in "The Green Trick," and the fraudulent statistics on so-called forest cover exposed by Jay Mazoomdaar in Tehelka last week, my fears about what India may look like 10 or 20 years from now are mounting.

According to the Hindustan Times, the PM intervened to open up the forest tracks on behalf of 30-50 new infrastructure projects, which are slated for environmental approval within 60 days and forest approval in six months, after meeting with a group of industrialists including Ratan Tata. But while it's all too reasonable to expect the environment ministry to clear projects in less than six years -- as the industrialists complain is the case -- it's a mistake to erase the line in the sand drawn by former minister Jairam Ramesh. 

The HT writes that more than 100 NGOs from across the country will meet in Delhi this weekend to discuss ways to protect India's dwindling forest cover and degrading natural resources, which is all well and good, considering that the Centre for Science and Environment has noted that clearances for new projects have exceeded the visions of the 11th and 12th five-year plans.

But NGOs can only do so much when multi-billion dollar businesses and the government itself are conspiring to obscure what is happening.

As Subramanian writes, EIAs are habitually manipulated to show that projects are viable. Investigator Sagar Dhara, for instance, was able to find projects that were given the green light before it was even determined where they would be located, EIA documents lifted verbatim from reports prepared for other projects (or in other countries), and more than a few that seemed made up altogether.  Yet, "the routine manner in which the government clears them is also alarming," Subramanian explains. "According to government data, the MOEF cleared most of the 2,746 EIAs filed in the two-year period beginning September 14, 2006, the day a new EIA notification came into force. The data was collected by the EIA Environment Resource and Response Centre, or ERC, an initiative of the New Delhi NGO LIFE, through a Right to Information Act application."

At the same time, as Jay Mazoomdaar points out, the forest department is fudging its statistics on forest cover. According to these officials, India's forests have actually thrived and even expanded during the past 60 years, even as the country's population increased by three and a half times.  According to the latest State of the Forest report (concocted since 1987) India's forests have grown by 49,986 sq km (7.78 percent) in the past 25 years.  Even lovely and pastoral Delhi, where "potholes are perhaps the only water bodies left," boasts 56 sq km of "dense forest."

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Powerful explosion rocks bus stand in northwestern city of Peshawar, killing at least 12 and wounding dozens.

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© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

"We fear that their lives will be put at risk," a military told media

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A colonoscopy to detect growths that may lead to colon cancer cuts a person's overall risk in half, a new study has confirmed.

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Judge rules that the two companies are both liable for damages and penalties that could run into billions of dollars

Countries hold first talks since Kim Jong-il's death in Beijing, in effort to restart wider six-nation negotiations.

At least seven killed and 24 wounded in early morning explosion in Iraqi capital, and police say death toll could rise.

Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik killed in deadly assault on Syrian city as activists warn of humanitarian crisis.